SOCO IMAGE GALLERY


 

French 1     The Toadstool

French 1 is a small grouping of stars located outside the stream of the Summer Milky Way along the borders of the constellations Delphinus and Pegasus. It is classified as an "probable asterism", meaning that it is not a true open cluster but a chance alignment of unrelated stars. It was first described in 1997 by Susan French, who writes the monthly "Deep-Sky Wonders" segment in Sky and Telescope. She described its outline as looking like a connect-the-dots toadstool, with the stem pointing toward the upper left corner of my image and the cap pointing toward the lower right corner (squinting a bit at my image may help visualize the shape).
While the "Toadstool" may not be a phyical object, it does contain a true astronomical object. The fuzzy, yellowish "star" next to the leftmost star in the base of the toadstool is the spiral galaxy NGC 7025. It has an apparent magnitude of 13 and is located far beyond the borders of our Milky Way galaxy.

Date(s) Acquired: 18 November 2015
Telescope: Orion 120mm EON Apochromatic Refractor
Camera: QSI Model 583 with Optec NextGEN Ultra Widefield 0.7X Telecompressor

 

   Exposure Time (min) 
   Number of Exposures
   RGB
   1.5
   Hα
   -
   Hβ
   -
   OIII
   -
   RGB
   16
   Hα
   0
   Hβ
   0
   OIII
   0

 

Processing:
Master red, green and blue images created using SuperSIAM.
Color composite image created using Basic Processing Procedure III.
Color composite image contrast-stretched using Adobe Photoshop.




 

 

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